Bottom of the class? The leaving certificate applied programme and track placement in the Republic of Ireland     

Joanne Banks  Delma Byrne  Selina McCoy  Emer Smyth 《Irish Educational Studies》2014,33(4):367-381

Across many countries, young people are differentiated into academic and vocational tracks, a pattern that is closely related to their social class background. The Irish secondary system has been largely undifferentiated, but the introduction of a pre-vocational programme, the Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA), has brought an element of tracking into upper secondary education. This article explores whether allocation into the LCA track reflects processes similar to those highlighted in international research. It goes further than these studies by explicitly recognising the role of school organisation in influencing student's learning careers and educational decisions. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the determinants of track placement in the Republic of Ireland. Using in-depth qualitative case study interviews with students from Irish post-primary schools, this paper examines the factors influencing students' decisions to enter the LCA programme. This paper explores the extent to which individual agency and school-level factors influence track choice by focusing on the learning careers of individual students within specific school contexts.  相似文献   

Finding the ‘Enunciative Space’ for Teacher Leadership and Teacher Learning in Schools     

John Smyth 《Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education》1998,26(3):191-202

Drawing on a collaborative Australian Research Council funded project entitled the ‘Teachers’ Learning Project’, the author takes issue with the rhetoric of the ‘learning society’ and, in particular, he interrogates the notion of the learning teacher in a number of schools. He provides a critical examination of the direction of teachers’ work under current technicist reconstruals of it. He draws on case studies to show how some schools have been able to position themselves as moral learning communities which have created vibrant indigenous cultures of learning about themselves, their community and their work in a context of a commitment to democratic and participatory citizenship.  相似文献